Italy’s military prosecutor has opened preliminary inquiries into serving military personnel linked to Roberto Vannacci’s Futuro Nazionale party, following a complaint filed by the Sindacato dei Militari, a trade union representing members of Italy’s armed forces.
The complaint, filed on September 2, asks prosecutors to examine whether active-duty personnel holding organisational or political roles within the party have breached rules requiring military neutrality and political impartiality.
The inquiry, led by Rome military prosecutor Marco De Paolis, does not formally concern Vannacci himself, a former Army general and now a member of the European Parliament, nor has he been placed under criminal investigation. No file has been entered in the register of criminal offences, prosecutors said, because the conduct described in the complaint was too general.
The case could nevertheless develop into a wider investigation into Futuro Nazionale and the possibility of its dissolution under Italy’s anti-Fascist legislation. That question in fact belongs to a second complaint, lodged on August 28 with the ordinary prosecutor’s office in Rome against Vannacci, national coordinator Massimiliano Simoni and programme chief Lorenzo Gasperini. The military prosecutor’s office has said the file before it makes no reference to the anti-Fascist law.
The Italian Constitution does not prohibit political movements simply for drawing inspiration from the ideas or rhetoric of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime. Its twelfth transitional and final provision, though, which entered into force on January 1, 1948, prohibits the reorganisation “in any form” of the dissolved Fascist Party and is given effect by Law 645 of 1952, the Scelba law.
The military dimension is central to the inquiry. The early Fascist movement was characterised by the presence of armed squads and by support from sections of the security forces. Against this historical backdrop, evidence that active-duty military personnel were not merely individual supporters but were organised within the party in a way that placed their loyalty to Futuro Nazionale above their duty to the State could become significant under Italy’s anti-Fascist laws.
If investigators were to establish such an arrangement, it could contribute to a case for the reconstitution of the Fascist Party and ultimately provide grounds for the compulsory dissolution of Futuro Nazionale.
The complaint identifies at least two serving personnel allegedly connected to Futuro Nazionale: Antonsergio Belfiori, an air force general listed on the party website as the contact for its committee in Villafranca di Verona, northern Italy, and Luigi Avveduto, a Carabinieri non-commissioned officer and councillor in a Rome municipality. Both are national secretaries of service unions and both have denied holding party office. The Sindacato dei Militari has asked prosecutors to establish what roles they actually held, whether they carried out political or organisational activities and whether they used their military status, rank or uniform for political purposes.
There is evidence that Vannacci’s political movement has attracted significant support, although no reliable public survey appears to measure support specifically among soldiers or police officers. Futuro Nazionale was polling at 7.5 per cent nationally in an SWG survey for TgLa7 dated August 31, making it Italy’s fourth-most popular political force at the time, ahead of Forza Italia on 7.1 per cent and the League on 5.7 per cent. Vannacci’s military background is nonetheless relevant to the movement’s identity: he is a former Army general who served in senior command positions before entering politics and who left the League, where he had been deputy leader, on February 3 to register a party of his own.
For Futuro Nazionale to be dissolved, authorities would have to establish substantially more than the presence of military personnel or controversial political rhetoric. Article 3 of the Scelba law provides that, once a court has established that an organisation has reorganised the Fascist Party, its dissolution and the confiscation of its assets are ordered by the interior minister after consultation with the Council of Ministers. In cases of exceptional necessity and urgency, the government can also order dissolution through a decree-law.
The available evidence, though, does not establish that Futuro Nazionale has already created a militia or paramilitary organisation. The significance of the military personnel currently under scrutiny is instead that their involvement could, depending on what investigators establish, reveal a more structured relationship between the party and serving members of the armed forces.
A dissolution of Vannacci’s party therefore appears unlikely on the evidence currently available. The preliminary inquiry could, though, become relevant to a broader case if investigators uncover evidence of an organised structure pursuing objectives that meet the legal definition of Fascist reorganisation. His lawyer, Giorgio Carta, said no criminal offence arose from the conduct described and that any question was disciplinary, as no statute expressly bars a serving soldier from holding party office.
Vannacci has rejected the allegation as “ridiculous” and defended his movement as constitutionally legitimate. Speaking at the Ambrosetti forum in Cernobbio, northern Italy, on September 5, he said the Scelba claim was “fantasy, if not science fiction”.